"Justice is Rotten"

While the late Alexandre Stavisky was pawning fake royal emeralds and cheating at baccarat in 1929, French politicians were having their nightmares about the Hanau Case. Last week French Justice, nearly paralyzed by the Stavisky Case, succeeded at least in warming over the Hanau Case.

Marthe Hanau knows as much about French official corruption as anyone. A bulbous, masculine woman of strong character, she and her divorced husband founded the tipster sheet. Gazette du Franc et des Nations, in 1925, and sold $4,000,000 worth of securities to poor Frenchmen, eight of whom committed suicide when she was jailed for swindling and bankruptcy. For 15 months she sat in her cell, without trial, out of public sight. Meanwhile, someone stole a bale of documents from the prosecuting attorney's office, later mailed back the rifled closet key. Finally, in 1930, Marthe went on a hunger strike to get her case into court, became a popular heroine. Forbidden to feed her forcibly in jail, police transferred her to a hospital. Then it took seven internes to hold her while they got the tube into her nostril. Left alone for a moment, the supposedly famished woman slid down a rope of sheets out the windows and went back to jail. Doctors said her physical condition was better than ever. The Hanau Case, loaded with political dynamite, was elaborately muffled by the courts. It got two editors, one duke and two counts into jail and poufed out with a conviction on a side-issue for two years, which Marthe had already served. In the end her creditors were her stoutest champions and Marthe had a new paper, Forces. Last week she stood up before another magistrate to be sentenced for having received stolen documents, published in Forces. Spoke up indomitable Marthe: "I would be ashamed to make my living the way you do. Justice is rotten and when I am in the presence of its representatives it gives me the greatest pleasure to tell them so.'' The court slapped on a contempt of court charge and sentenced Marthe to three months in jail.

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